SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Review

SVM enables you to monitor the configuration of hosts and virtual machines and identify systems which deviate from organizational standards.

The software automatically identifies both under-utilized and over-utilized virtual machines, enabling you to allocate resources more efficiently across physical machines.

You can use the software to predict and troubleshoot capacity issues. The software can also alert you when an unexpected capacity issue arises.

With SVM, you can save money by utilizing hardware more efficiently, and you can also save money by using VMWare and Hyper-V licenses more efficiently.

SVM also comes with widgets which you can use to provide visibility into the health of your virtual environment to others in your organization. Now instead of responding to status requests, you can just send users (or bosses) to your SVM status widgets.

SVM uses the Windows Management Interface (WMI) and VMWare API to gather necessary data — no agent installs are needed. The software itself comes as prepackaged virtual appliance. These two features together mean that you can be productively using the software in less than an hour.

If you’re interested in migrating your virtual machines to the cloud, SVM will even calculate the costs of migrating each VM to Amazon’s AWS EC2 service.

SolarWinds provides a free 30-day trial of SVM. If you run more than a handful of virtual machines, 30 days is more time than you’ll need to find value in this application.